James Terry was born in 1931 in Paris, France. At that time France was a republic under the Third Republic, a parliamentary system that had begun in 1870 and ended with the German occupation in 1940.
His French birth is the documented starting point of his biography, and his later legal career was based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Terry was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1958, qualifying him to practice law in that state. He is documented as a partner of Palmer & Dodge, a Boston law firm that had been established more than a century before 2005.
In 2005 Palmer & Dodge, which then had about 180 attorneys in Boston, merged with Edwards & Angell, a Providence firm founded in 1894, to form Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge with 520 attorneys and nine offices. The combined firm kept Boston as a base, and in 2011 it merged with Wildman, Harrold, Allen & Dixon to form Edwards Wildman Palmer.
